A pro-Russian Ukrainian politician was found dead near Moscow, Russian authorities said on Wednesday. A source in the Ukrainian defense sector claimed that a “special operation” by Kiev led to its “liquidation”.
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The lifeless body of Illia Kyva, a 46-year-old former Ukrainian lawmaker, was found with “a head injury” in the Odintsovo district near Moscow, Russian news agencies said, citing local authorities.
“The liquidation of the main traitor, collaborator and propagandist Illia Kyva was a special operation by the SBU,” a source with knowledge of their operations told AFP.
He was killed “with small arms,” she said.
Earlier, the Russian Investigative Committee announced the death of a Moscow-appointed occupation official who was killed when an “unidentified device” exploded in a car in Lugansk, an occupied city in Ukraine.
Oleg Popov, a former local deputy, died “as a result of the detonation of an unidentified device in a car,” the Investigative Committee said, adding that the circumstances of his death are “being clarified.”
The committee said Mr Popov was twice elected to the separatist “parliament” in Lugansk and released images showing a destroyed and charred car surrounded by working investigators.
According to local media Lug-info, the 51-year-old man was a businessman who joined Moscow-backed pro-Russian separatists after the conflict with Kiev began in 2014.
In particular, according to this source, he chaired a committee responsible for security and defense issues.
In the four Ukrainian regions that Moscow has allegedly annexed (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia), there are regular attacks on officials of the Russian occupation administration, some of them fatal.
In early November, Ukraine claimed responsibility for the car bombing of Mikhail Filiponenko, a deputy and former high-ranking local military official, also in the Lugansk region.
The Russian security services (FSB), for their part, accused Kiev of being behind the assassination attempt in late October in the annexed Crimea of another former Ukrainian MP who had defected to the Russian side, Oleg Zarev.
Moscow also accuses Kiev of being behind several assassinations or attempted assassinations on Russian territory since the Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022.
Previously, there had already been deadly clashes between separatists in the areas under pro-Russian control in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.